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As a followup to my previous post, I now turn to RESTful web services. I originally encountered the term when attending php|tropics in 2005, where George Schlossnaggle likened it to simple GET and POST requests. Since then, the architectural style — and developer understanding of the architectural style — has improved a bit, and a more solid definition can be made.

At its heart, REST simply dictates that a given resource have a unique address, and that you interact with that resource using HTTP verbs. The standard verbs utilized are:

GET: retrieve a list of resources, or, if an identifier is present, view a single resource

POST: create a new resource with the data provided in the POST

PUT: update an existing resource as specified by an identifier, using the PUT data

One of the latest (sort of) crazes sweeping the net is APIs, more specifically those that leverage REST. It’s really no surprise either, as consuming REST APIs is so incredibly easy… in any language. It’s also incredibly easy to create them as you essentially use nothing more than an HTTP spec that has existed for ages. One of the few things that I give Rails credit for is its well thought-out REST support, both for providing and consuming these APIs (as its been explained by all the Rails fanboys I work with).

Seriously, if you’ve never used REST, but you’ve ever had to work with (or worse, create) a SOAP API, or simply opened a WSDL and had your head explode, boy do I have good news for you! Continue reading →

Musicians will understand this analogy. Have you ever tried to learn a piece that goes the wrong way? That is, you’re playing along and it’s so obvious where the next notes are going to go and instead the piece goes off in a completely different direction. Half the time you find yourself playing the notes you think the piece should use rather than the notes it does use. Continue reading →

Web service designers have tried for some time now to correlate CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) semantics with the Representational State Transfer (REST) verbs defined by the HTTP specification–GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, HEAD, etc.

So often, developers will try to correlate these two concepts–CRUD and REST–using a one-to-one mapping of verbs from the two spaces, like this: Continue reading →

It’s been a while since I last time played with beauty of Zend Framework.

Each time I check new features it seems to me that the things are more simplier than the last time,
I might be wrong (I wouldn’t bet on that) or I’m just getting better

Let’s check this piece of cake – how you can create navigation with breadcrumbs in Zend Framework project.
As many things in Zend Framework you can get same features in different ways,
so the same thing goes with the Zend_Navigation class. Continue reading →

I was playing with SOAP for the last few days. I must say, it looks somewhat complicated in some areas. After some google-ing on SOAP vs REST stuff I decided to write this simple ZendFramework REST how to. Actualy this is a PHP part of tutorial since I was working on a PHP and C# solution using Mono framework for C# part can be found on my site. My desire was to create a web service in PHP environment and consume that service in C# environment.Getting started with REST using ZendFramework. Here’s the PHP REST server part. Continue reading →

Web developers today have a myriad of technologies they can choose from; everything from simplified database access, to easy wrapping of existing middleware services, to a plethora of interesting client side software. All of these products and tools are there to give web developers the ability to create the best web-based applications in the shortest amount of time.

However, having a massive set of possible software solutions is one challenge, picking the specific approach for specific parts of the web applications is another, and web developers today have to juggle many of these decisions with changing standards or approaches seemingly appearing daily. Continue reading →

I am seeing a lot of new web services are implemented using a REST style architecture these days rather than a SOAP one. Lets step back a second and explain what REST is.

What is a REST Web Service

The acronym REST stands for Representational State Transfer, this basically means that each unique URL is a representation of some object. You can get the contents of that object using an HTTP GET, to delete it, you then might use a POST, PUT, or DELETE to modify the object (in practice most of the services use a POST for this).

Who’s using REST?

All of Yahoo’s web services use REST, including Flickr, del.icio.us API uses it, pubsub, bloglines, technorati, and both eBay, and Amazon have web services for both REST and SOAP. Continue reading →